Owning the stack: The legal war to control the smartphone platform

The Smartphone Wars have now become an all-out legal battle, with copyrights, …

In the last few weeks, the smartphone industry appeared to produce more lawsuits than phones. Apple briefly managed to stop the sale of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 in all of Europe, and is now going after the whole Galaxy line. Back Stateside, Google first complained that Microsoft and Apple were using "bogus patents" to target Android, then spent $12 billion for Motorola and its patent arsenal. These are big, high-stakes fights—and the last company left standing may walk away with control over nothing less than the smartphone market itself.

In the flood of stories about tactical filings and counter-filings, it's easy to get lost in the details. But step back and it's clear that the Smartphone Wars aren't just a war of all against all; there's an underlying logic to these disputes. Most companies are fighting to control one part of the hardware-software stack, then use that control to pry money free from the layers above them.

But the really big players—the Apples and Googles of the world—are fighting over the stack itself. Their combat arena: the global legal system.

Meet the stack

A smartphone's "smarts" require plenty of tech. Think about all the layers that come together so that you could play Angry Birds on your iPhone:

The app itself: Rovio's Angry Birds

The operating system that supports downloadable apps: Apple's iOS

The device that runs the OS: the iPhone, also by Apple.

The cellular network that the device connects to: AT&T or Verizon in the US

These different parts make up a stack: layers that fit together, each one on top of the next, to do cool things for users. Good combinations sell well, making money for the participants. Everyone wants to be part of a winning stack, but even better is to be the bottleneck in a winning stack so that everyone else can join in only on your terms—and at your price.

Enter the law. Players in the Smartphone Wars use lawsuits and threatening letters on law-firm letterhead to secure the ground on which they stand, or to cut the ground out from beneath someone else, all seeking to secure or bolster their place in the stack. There are three kinds of plays:

Horizontal plays are disputes between players at the same level in the stack. The goal is to keep a competitor from imitating you too closely. When app developers copy each others' names, icons, and artwork, that's a horizontal issue: they're competing for the same consumer dollars by doing the same kind of thing a little too slavishly. The law here—primarily copyright, trademark, and patent—is all about balance. With weak protections, copycat ripoff artists come out of the woodwork; with strong protections, the problem is trolls.

Vertical plays try to seize control of the stack from the players above (and sometimes from the players below). Think about the iPhone's anti-jailbreaking features, which are designed in part to ensure that no one puts an app on an iPhone unless they pay Apple's 30 percent toll. This is a subtle game; companies want to be open enough to be part of a rich and vibrant stack, but closed enough to capture value from the other layers. Copyright and the DMCA do a lot of work here, with antitrust increasingly pushing back against them.

Strategic plays target an entire stack. The all-out patent wars now coming to a boil are strategic: if some of Apple's lawsuits succeed, the whole Android stack could end up toast. There are also plays here designed not to shut down a competitor but to hold a stack upside down and shake it until all the money falls out. Patents are the preferred weapon here. Since there's no "independent invention" defense, a well-aimed patent barrage can land without warning and leave nowhere to hide.

So here's the plan: we'll start at the bottom of the stack and move up, looking at the horizontal and vertical plays taking place at each level. Then we'll circle back and look at the all-out assaults on the different competing stacks.

Controlling the Network

Vertically, life at the network layer is regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC allocates blocks of spectrum to the carriers, usually by auction. In order to start running a cellphone network, you need to persuade the FCC either to make more spectrum available (which doesn't happen often but may be in the works through a reallocation of the UHF TV spectrum) or buy access from someone who has spectrum already. At the moment, the four biggest US networks are run by Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile (AT&T's proposed merger with T-Mobile has run into trouble over fears that it would lead to too much concentration and too little competition.)

Horizontally, the carriers have been known to throw some sharp elbows at each other in their cutthroat competition for subscribers. In 2009, AT&T sued Verizon over Verizon's "There's a Map for That" commercials making fun of AT&T's lackluster 3G coverage. A judge sided with Verizon in the first round of skirmishing, and the companies quickly settled after that.

Controlling the device

Moving up to the device layer, let's start with vertical controls by the network operator over devices. Most often, whoever owns a block of spectrum can set whatever rules they want about who can use it and on what terms. One partial exception is the "700Mhz block," which was auctioned off in 2008. Google entered the bidding and forced the price up enough to trigger open access rules allowing consumers to use devices and applications of their choice. Google—whom we'll meet repeatedly as we reach the higher layers of the stack—is concerned that anyone with too much control at a lower layer could use that control to squeeze free some of the cash pouring out of its search advertising money machine by threatening to cut off access unless Google pays up. (This same fear of being squeezed drives Google to support network neutrality, albeit half-heartedly.)

The traditional model in the industry was that carriers would use their more-or-less absolute lock on the network to take the upper hand in negotiating with device makers over which phones would be available on which networks. The only way for device makers to fight back was to have a truly compelling phone that users would actually switch carriers to use. RIM pulled it off with the CrackBerry, then Apple managed to talk Cingular/AT&T into unusually generous terms, including higher-than-usual subsidies for the iPhone and more control over iPhone packaging and sales. Another alternative for device makers is to route around the carriers by going WiFi-only: the iPod Touch is effectively a "phone-less phone."

Unsurprisingly, carriers also want to convince customers—willingly or unwillingly—not to switch networks once they have the phone, which means taking a little control over the phone itself. Early termination fees, backed up by contract law, are the first line of defense. But there's also a technical angle. Locking is an antifeature that keeps the phone from working on any other network. Presto: the cost to switch carriers has just gone up by the price of a new phone. For this reason, there has always been a thriving business in unlocking cell phones and in telling other users how to unlock them. And that doesn't make the carriers happy. Tracfone, a cellphone company that sells prepaid by-the-minute plans, started suing retailers who unlocked its phones for a violation of the DMCA. (The "copyrighted work" in question is the software on the cell phone itself.) This led the Library of Congress to exempt unlocking from parts of the DMCA in 2006 and again in 2010. Tracfone, though, has kept on suing unlocking retailers, and has even won despite the exemption.

Horizontally, there have been some fairly silly lawsuits over phone names. Would you have thought that Motorola's DROID should get a license from George Lucas? Or that ANDROID itself might step on the toes of Android Data's rights? (A judge held that it didn't.) Would a phone-buying consumer think that Google's NEXUS comes from the estate of Philip K. Dick? Google also had trouble with a similar mark from a telecom company; Google's successful defense was that tons of other computer and telecom companies use NEXUS (not exactly the best defense of Google's own trademark rights in the word). More recently, Motorola has been sued by Xoom Wireless over the XOOM. You might also remember the BLACKBERRY vs. BLACKJACK dispute, or the brief Cisco-vs.-Apple fight over IPHONE.

Good thing there's a Linux smartphone coming which flies far above this battlefield, called the N9.

Sadly, it's rather moot as Nokia is dumping all the effort put into it to rush headlong into the WP7 camp. That said, I expect that even non-Android Linux platforms would come under serious attack from Apple and Microsoft if they perceived them to be as much of a threat as Android, with Florian posting uninformative FUD and getting cited on Ars and other sites just as loudly.

I think the IP warfare is so intense because there's a real apocalyptic feeling out there. Not the world or the economy, but that these markets - smartphones, tablets and associated cloud services - are probably the last major markets in tech. So the stakes are perceived as the highest, and the system is just overwhelmed.

It's such a broad article, let me add the broadest sentiment: we see all the signs of the Chinese century in this decade: gov't supported monopolies, IP thievery, legal bludgeons, snooping, cyberwarfare and cyberuprisings, surveillance, news tampering and suppression, inequality and intellectually complacent citizenry. Our parents won a moon shot, but we're all guests at the madhatter's tea party.

The computer industry evolved over thirty or forty years with only two important legal actions, the anti trust law suits against IBM and Microsoft. The only other suit I can remember from my career at IBM though the 1980's and 1990's was a copyright lawsuit involving the product that I worked on. During that time software evolved from being an economically insignificant product to being a very large profit maker for companies like Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. Unsurprisingly, the software industry worked out some kind of understanding on intellectual property mostly without having recourse to the courts. That legal understanding was built around a model where software was a proprietary product and the profit came from its owner licensing its use. Probably, in part motivated by their antitrust difficulties, neither IBM nor Microsoft made a major effort to use their intellectual property ownership to lock out competition.Recently, we appear to have entered a new era where the industry understanding about software intellectual property has become very unsettled. There are several reasons.One is certainly the increasing role of free software. Free software has no owner to resolve any intellectual property issues and the free software developers have focused on different intellectual property rules. That leaves those who want to exploit the free software for commercial business with the task of resolving intellectual property issues without owning the patents that have become the common currency of typical negotiations.Another is the emergence of new businesses. Google may be giving away software. But they are a very commercial company making a large amount of money off of their services. The trend to bundle hardware, software, networking, and services smells heavily of anticompetitive practices especially since there is no technical reason why all of the components of this business could not be mixed and matched as the consumer wished.Another is the reality of the Apple brand. Apple has risen to the top of the capitalist stack based on its brand identity. Clearly there are going to be real intellectual property issues in exactly what it owns and to what degree it can block competitors from copying its look and feel.Yet another that is just emerging is the rise of the Asian hardware vendors. The Asians are not likely to be satisfied forever with American dominance over system software. Android provides a commercially viable platform based entirely on free software. It is the first major challenge to Apple and Microsoft dominance over commercial client platforms. There is a lot at stake in the question if anyone can just pick it up and have their own operating system platform.

The computer industry evolved over thirty or forty years with only two important legal actions, the anti trust law suits against IBM and Microsoft. The only other suit I can remember from my career at IBM though the 1980's and 1990's was a copyright lawsuit involving the product that I worked on. During that time software evolved from being an economically insignificant product to being a very large profit maker for companies like Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. Unsurprisingly, the software industry worked out some kind of understanding on intellectual property mostly without having recourse to the courts. That legal understanding was built around a model where software was a proprietary product and the profit came from its owner licensing its use. Probably, in part motivated by their antitrust difficulties, neither IBM nor Microsoft made a major effort to use their intellectual property ownership to lock out competition.Recently, we appear to have entered a new era where the industry understanding about software intellectual property has become very unsettled. There are several reasons.One is certainly the increasing role of free software. Free software has no owner to resolve any intellectual property issues and the free software developers have focused on different intellectual property rules. That leaves those who want to exploit the free software for commercial business with the task of resolving intellectual property issues without owning the patents that have become the common currency of typical negotiations.Another is the emergence of new businesses. Google may be giving away software. But they are a very commercial company making a large amount of money off of their services. The trend to bundle hardware, software, networking, and services smells heavily of anticompetitive practices especially since there is no technical reason why all of the components of this business could not be mixed and matched as the consumer wished.Another is the reality of the Apple brand. Apple has risen to the top of the capitalist stack based on its brand identity. Clearly there are going to be real intellectual property issues in exactly what it owns and to what degree it can block competitors from copying its look and feel.Yet another that is just emerging is the rise of the Asian hardware vendors. The Asians are not likely to be satisfied forever with American dominance over system software. Android provides a commercially viable platform based entirely on free software. It is the first major challenge to Apple and Microsoft dominance over commercial client platforms. There is a lot at stake in the question if anyone can just pick it up and have their own operating system platform.

Good article, might have been a little less confusing if you had tried to keep the consumer front and center as you discussed each of the layers of the stack. You explain, for instance, why locking is important to the carriers, but not (specifically) how it harms consumers. Why is it bad that consumers can't switch carriers easily? How would it change the landscape if they could?

Consumers have the most skin in the game, yet none of the legal wrangling is going to make their lives any better.

Awesome article! This is in a nutshell what Ars does best, distill and present the big picture, no other site does. Big kudos. The patent mess has to be fixed by governments in the US and abroad, the current state is just insanity, there is no investor or company clarity on what you can do to innovate without being sued into oblivion.

Good thing there's a Linux smartphone coming which flies far above this battlefield, called the N9.

Sadly, it's rather moot as Nokia is dumping all the effort put into it to rush headlong into the WP7 camp. That said, I expect that even non-Android Linux platforms would come under serious attack from Apple and Microsoft if they perceived them to be as much of a threat as Android, with Florian posting uninformative FUD and getting cited on Ars and other sites just as loudly.

How? Nokia has settled with Apple (with Apple paying) and the parts it does not fully own in the Harmattan stack are open source. Apple isn't going to sue, Google hasn't got anything to sue (Symbian's and Android's "widgets and shortcuts" UI appeared almost simultaneously but both were based on Nokia's earlier Maemo UIs), and Microsoft would have to pay Nokia if it sued, just like Apple did, but they're the best of friends nowadays!

How? Nokia has settled with Apple (with Apple paying) and the parts it does not fully own in the Harmattan stack are open source.

They resolved a hardware patent suit, I'm sure Apple could fire some software patent suits off if they really wanted to. Also, being open source does not render you immune to patent suits.

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Apple isn't going to sue

You can never be sure, which is the problem with software patents.

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Google hasn't got anything to sue (Symbian's and Android's "widgets and shortcuts" UI appeared almost simultaneously but both were based on Nokia's Maemo5/N900 UI)

Only Google I don't expect to sue.

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Microsoft would have to pay Nokia if it sued, just like Apple did, but they're the best of friends nowadays!

I was not referring to the N9. I was referring to ANY mobile Linux platform (on the condition that it threatened MS/Apple.) I fully expect that even had Google not gone fully NIH with Android, we'd still be seeing these suits with the exception of Oracle.

And with respect to the N9, neither Apple nor MS care because MS managed to (mostly) kill the platform before it got off the ground.

It's all about eliminating competition. That's probably the hallmark of every decision, rule, and action in the mobile space.

Meanwhile, if car companies (uh oh! car analogy!) had done the same thing we'd still be driving with reverse tillers to change direction instead of the steering wheel, which was only invented 15 years after the car was invented.

iOS and Android seem to have sucked all innovation from the mobile phone space, by defining "smartphone" as what they themselves are. There are better ways, as WP7, WebOS and Harmattan tried to do. The better ways are being crowded out because of the stack wars (like, Nokia being crowded out of the US market because of not playing ball with operator's lobotomizing of phones and WebOS being boxed in because HP wouldn't invest in the software stack [edit: in the absence of 3rd party developer support])

I think everyone should keep in mind that, while there are clearly levels of cut-throat capitalism that should not be allowed, eliminating the competition isn't inherently anti-competitive, it is very much part of competition.

What I think you mean is that it isn't inherently monopolistic. The problem is that they're smart enough to try and avoid falling into the monopoly trap. Just enough "competition" to avoid antitrust trials, and enough lobbying to keep eyes off them.

When Apple attacks vertically, they aren't only trying to get money from up or down the stack. They are also trying to protect their lower levels of the stack. For example, when the Internet supplanted whatever it was that came before, it made Windows be largely irrelevant -- you could run the web on top of anything. Likewise, if there is a open marketplace for "Apps," there is a strong danger that we'll stop using Safari, Mail, iCal, iTunes, etc. which all play heavily into Apple's strategy. One of the key's to Apple's increasing reliance on software lock-in is because of their fear that software will always let you do things that they and their partners don't want you to. Examples: iTunes and iPhoto with their numerous 3rd party deals baked in.

What I think you mean is that it isn't inherently monopolistic. The problem is that they're smart enough to try and avoid falling into the monopoly trap. Just enough "competition" to avoid antitrust trials, and enough lobbying to keep eyes off them.

No that's not what I mean. The elimination of competitors naturally occurs during the course of competition. Whether it occurs due to market forces or legal forces doesn't matter. What does matter is if those forces cross the line of overly cut-throat capitalism, a line which is unfortunately quite blurry at times.

Good article, might have been a little less confusing if you had tried to keep the consumer front and center as you discussed each of the layers of the stack. You explain, for instance, why locking is important to the carriers, but not (specifically) how it harms consumers. Why is it bad that consumers can't switch carriers easily? How would it change the landscape if they could?

I'm not really convinced that Apple is seriously concerned about monetizing the app-portion of the stack. Yes, they take 30%, but reading into Apple's financials implies quite strongly that any profit from the App Store is basically a rounding error to Apple. It is basically a break-even business for Apple. Even if they took 100% of the app revenue, that would still be small compared to the profit of just selling iPhones. The same can be said for music sales. Apple has never made any significant money off of selling music.

I know it is hard to believe for Apple haters, but if you look at the early history of the iPhone, Apple was clearly exploring the concept of running Apps through the web browser. They tried to convince people that HTML5 was the way to develop for the iPhone, but people griped about the shortcomings (like the lack of local storage for offline use). The day after Apple announced that they would do Apps for the iPhone, there was a quiet check-in of HTML5 local storage to the WebKit tree. Apple really was looking at trying to make development more WebOS-like (HTML5/JS) than what we now know of iOS (ObjC). If HTML5/JS had been farther down the path, we might have gotten a legitimate development platform for iOS that would have been easily ported across all platforms that used Webkit for their browsers.

The elimination of competitors naturally occurs during the course of competition.

It does. However, I don't see that happening in the mobile space, yet. Certainly, if anyone (other than an android device maker) does exit the business then I would see it as being deliberately anti-competitive due to how few players there are in the mobile space, both in the OS level and the (US) carrier level.

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Whether it occurs due to market forces or legal forces doesn't matter.

It does, really. Market forces is much more an honest judgement than an all out patent war that makes it impossible for new competitors to appear and makes attempting to actually innovate a risky proposition. If the patent system is the tool by which competition is eliminated, then I don't see how the patent system is serving its purpose.

David Hovis wrote:

I'm not really convinced that Apple is seriously concerned about monetizing the app-portion of the stack.

As things progress forward, eventually they will reach the saturation point and income beyond merely device sales will become increasingly important. I don't believe their revenues can stay this high forever.

I'm not really convinced that Apple is seriously concerned about monetizing the app-portion of the stack. Yes, they take 30%, but reading into Apple's financials implies quite strongly that any profit from the App Store is basically a rounding error to Apple. It is basically a break-even business for Apple. Even if they took 100% of the app revenue, that would still be small compared to the profit of just selling iPhones. The same can be said for music sales. Apple has never made any significant money off of selling music.

I know it is hard to believe for Apple haters, but if you look at the early history of the iPhone, Apple was clearly exploring the concept of running Apps through the web browser. They tried to convince people that HTML5 was the way to develop for the iPhone, but people griped about the shortcomings (like the lack of local storage for offline use). The day after Apple announced that they would do Apps for the iPhone, there was a quiet check-in of HTML5 local storage to the WebKit tree. Apple really was looking at trying to make development more WebOS-like (HTML5/JS) than what we now know of iOS (ObjC). If HTML5/JS had been farther down the path, we might have gotten a legitimate development platform for iOS that would have been easily ported across all platforms that used Webkit for their browsers.

The iTunes store doesn't have to be a cash cow in order for it to be an exit barrier to Apple customers. The more things that Apple users buy that they can't easily take with them when they leave are just one more thing to keep them permanently tied to Apple.

It's the same exact situation as what happened with MS-DOS only applications.

I'm not really convinced that Apple is seriously concerned about monetizing the app-portion of the stack.

As things progress forward, eventually they will reach the saturation point and income beyond merely device sales will become increasingly important. I don't believe their revenues can stay this high forever.

I used to think the same thing about Apple selling music. Flash back 6 years or so and I was thinking: "Yes, they're making money hand-over-fist selling iPods now, but in a few years it will be the music revenue that is really important". Today: iPods are declining rapidly in sales, but Apple is still making money hand-over-fist selling iPhones and iPads. Music revenue is still marginal at best.

Besides which, I've been an iPhone user since 2007 (original, 3GS, waiting for the 5). I doubt I've spent more than $50 on apps the whole time. Meanwhile, I've spent (with carrier subsidies) $1200 on iPhones, and I'm ready to drop another $600 as soon as the 5 drops. Do you really think it is worth Apple's time to squeeze more out of that $50 in apps than the $15 they already get?

Whether it occurs due to market forces or legal forces doesn't matter.

It does, really. Market forces is much more an honest judgement than an all out patent war that makes it impossible for new competitors to appear and makes attempting to actually innovate a risky proposition. If the patent system is the tool by which competition is eliminated, then I don't see how the patent system is serving its purpose.

I wholeheartedly agree with everything but the first sentence. Market forces can be just as insidious, such as cartel price fixing or price dumping or exclusive buying and selling. But everything else you said was good. Personally I think that the case against HTC invoking decade old mobile patents from unrelated devices goes too far because it implicates all current and future entrants. The lawsuits by Oracle however don't seem inherently bad because they only implicate Google and only if Google was willfully infringing (which evidence seems to be pointing to).

I'm not really convinced that Apple is seriously concerned about monetizing the app-portion of the stack. Yes, they take 30%, but reading into Apple's financials implies quite strongly that any profit from the App Store is basically a rounding error to Apple. It is basically a break-even business for Apple. Even if they took 100% of the app revenue, that would still be small compared to the profit of just selling iPhones. The same can be said for music sales. Apple has never made any significant money off of selling music.

I know it is hard to believe for Apple haters, but if you look at the early history of the iPhone, Apple was clearly exploring the concept of running Apps through the web browser. They tried to convince people that HTML5 was the way to develop for the iPhone, but people griped about the shortcomings (like the lack of local storage for offline use). The day after Apple announced that they would do Apps for the iPhone, there was a quiet check-in of HTML5 local storage to the WebKit tree. Apple really was looking at trying to make development more WebOS-like (HTML5/JS) than what we now know of iOS (ObjC). If HTML5/JS had been farther down the path, we might have gotten a legitimate development platform for iOS that would have been easily ported across all platforms that used Webkit for their browsers.

I'll chalk HP up to horrible mismanagement. They seem to have a problem with that as of late.

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I wholeheartedly agree with everything but the first sentence. Market forces can be just as insidious, such as cartel price fixing or price dumping or exclusive buying and selling.

I don't believe those are market forces. Those specifically work against market forces (thus why price fixing attracts the attention of regulators and results in nice fines and possible prison sentences.)

Tracfone shouldn't be entered into this discussion as they sell seriously subsidized prepaid handsets, making their service affordable to the masses that don't want anything smart. Them using the software on the phone itself, in court, to protect their phones from being unlocked is merely a method to an end. All tracfone are doing is protecting the subsidy they forego when selling a phone. Because it's prepaid, there can be no ETF.

I'm not really convinced that Apple is seriously concerned about monetizing the app-portion of the stack. Yes, they take 30%, but reading into Apple's financials implies quite strongly that any profit from the App Store is basically a rounding error to Apple. It is basically a break-even business for Apple. Even if they took 100% of the app revenue, that would still be small compared to the profit of just selling iPhones. The same can be said for music sales. Apple has never made any significant money off of selling music.

I know it is hard to believe for Apple haters, but if you look at the early history of the iPhone, Apple was clearly exploring the concept of running Apps through the web browser. They tried to convince people that HTML5 was the way to develop for the iPhone, but people griped about the shortcomings (like the lack of local storage for offline use). The day after Apple announced that they would do Apps for the iPhone, there was a quiet check-in of HTML5 local storage to the WebKit tree. Apple really was looking at trying to make development more WebOS-like (HTML5/JS) than what we now know of iOS (ObjC). If HTML5/JS had been farther down the path, we might have gotten a legitimate development platform for iOS that would have been easily ported across all platforms that used Webkit for their browsers.

While I would love cross-platform apps, there's only so much you can do with it. Nice to have both. If they remained browser apps only a lot of stuff would never come to fruition.

I know it is hard to believe for Apple haters, but if you look at the early history of the iPhone, Apple was clearly exploring the concept of running Apps through the web browser. They tried to convince people that HTML5 was the way to develop for the iPhone, but people griped about the shortcomings (like the lack of local storage for offline use). The day after Apple announced that they would do Apps for the iPhone, there was a quiet check-in of HTML5 local storage to the WebKit tree. Apple really was looking at trying to make development more WebOS-like (HTML5/JS) than what we now know of iOS (ObjC). If HTML5/JS had been farther down the path, we might have gotten a legitimate development platform for iOS that would have been easily ported across all platforms that used Webkit for their browsers.

I've heard this narrative before, and it's never been convincing. Remember that the gap between the market launch of the iPhone (summer 07) and the public announcement of the SDK (spring 08) was about nine months. As tightly-run of a ship as Apple is, I find it hard to believe that in the span of nine months, Apple whipped out a fully-featured SDK for third-party use based off of customer feedback. Granted, some rudimentary SDK necessarily would have existed earlier for Apple's internal team to write the userland first-party iPhone applications, but given the realities of large software projects, this kind of turnaround time seems wildly optimistic. I find it more likely that the SDK wasn't ready when the iPhone hardware was ready.

But hey, I could be totally wrong.

Article wrote:

Google's Android is an interesting twist on the latter model; the software is open source and the license price is $0.

Could this be corroborated with a link, please? Obviously, the base Android code is free since it's licensed under Apache, but the Google App pack (Maps, Gmail, Market -- all of the software that justifies buying an Android phone) is proprietary and is only licensed to certain Google partners, who must sign a licensing agreement.

People all over the Internet constantly repeat the line that Android is "free", yet I've yet to see hard evidence that Google actually licenses its Apps for free. Seeing that Google Apps define the Android experience, the distinction between Android's price and Google Apps' price is highly relevant.

I wholeheartedly agree with everything but the first sentence. Market forces can be just as insidious, such as cartel price fixing or price dumping or exclusive buying and selling.

I don't believe those are market forces. Those specifically work against market forces (thus why price fixing attracts the attention of regulators and results in nice fines and possible prison sentences.)

Market forces are the buying, selling, distribution and pricing of goods and services. Everything I said above is a market force by definition, whether you 'believe' it or not. They also happen to be illegal in most places, but that doesn't change the fact that they are market forces when they occur.

My head is exploding with the sheer awesomeness of the graphics involved here. Well done.

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Is there a web award for "best artist for artwork accompanying article?" Because if not they should invent one just to give Aurich props.

Wow, you're going to really inflate my ego with this stuff.

It's rare that I get a chance to shoot original photography for Ars stories, so I'm glad that opening image seemed to work well for you. Shot that on my office floor with a 100mm macro lens from about 5 or 6 feet away, easy way to really limit the depth of field that hard. Who knew that stuff Angry Birds toy my wife gave me as a joke would come in handy!